Man Removed From JetBlue Flight for Reportedly Harassing Ivanka Trump

The holidays are reliably a time of occasional nightmare travel experiences, but an incident involving Ivanka Trump and a JetBlue flight is more than a little surreal even by those standards.

On Thursday morning, a commercial JetBlue flight leaving New York's JFK airport found itself with some unexpected passengers in Ivanka and her family, who have historically gone her father's preferred route of traveling on private planes. As boarding got underway, two passengers were eventually removed from the flight for expressing their extreme displeasure to be sharing legroom with the future First Daughter, who's expected to play a significant role in her father's administration.

Before the flight, Matthew Lasner, a professor at Hunter College, tweeted about seeing Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner in the terminal. In the message, which was captured by Jezebel, before he deleted his entire account, Lasner wrote, "Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them," hashtagging it "#banalityofevil."

And Lasner and his husband only got more upset upon seeing that they were booked on the same flight as the Trump-Kushner brood. TMZ reports that upon boarding, Lasner's husband began hassling Trump, yelling, "Your father is ruining the country" and demanding to know why she was flying commercial. He reportedly continued, "Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private."

The disturbance caught the attention of flight crew, who then removed Lasner's husband from the flight. TMZ says he "screamed," asking "You're kicking me off for expressing my opinion?" as he was being escorted off the plane, all the while Trump ignored the badgering, reportedly distracting her kids with crayons.

JetBlue has since released a statement about the incident: "The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. Our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight."